Xiaomi Mi Notebook 15.6″ Review

This September saw the launch of a 15.6-inch Mi Notebook and two smartphones: Mi MIX 2 and Mi Note 3. In this article, we will show you the new laptop in live photos and test its performance.

Design

The design of Xiaomi Mi Notebook 15.6″ is stunning. The laptop has an all-metal body with a durable coating, achieved through sandblasting and polishing. Matte texture is really pleasant to touch. Fingerprints are not visible on it.

The lid can be opened with one hand, but it takes some effort, as the hinges are a bit tight. The maximum lid angle though is almost 150 degrees. That is also very impressive since we could pull back the lid of Mi Notebook 13.3″ to around 135 degrees. Size-wise Mi Notebook 15.6″ is a real monster out of all Mi laptops and it weighs it accordingly (1.95kg).

That’s how it looks side by side with Mi Notebook 13.3″.

On its back, you will find perforation holes, Harman Infinity speakers with Dolby Surround technology support, and a non-removable 60Wh battery.

Display

Excellent quality of display is a common feature of the entire line Mi notebooks. Mi Notebook 15.6″ is equipped with a 15.6-inch IPS panel with a full HD resolution. It can show up to 72% of color gamut and be bright at several levels.

The size of bezel around the panel is 6.52mm. It is smaller than what a 13.3-inch version has, but the screen-to-body ratio of the latter is higher (81.5%). However, this does not affect that much how you see the picture. Also, the display is protected with a Corning Gorilla Glass 3.

Keyboard and touchpad

Mi Notebook 15.6″ comes with a full-size keyboard. We were impressed by its quick tactile feedback and would probably call it the keyboard we could type all day long. The keys are not too large and the space between them is convenient. It takes a little effort to press each key. The trigger distance is only 1.5mm. For those who touch-type or type fast the keyboard is a godsend.

The touchpad turned out to be of more than an average size. It responds quickly to a touch. In the upper right corner one of it there is a fingerprint scanner, also very sensitive and responsive.

Interfaces

With a new version of Mi Notebook Xiaomi offers more interfaces. As a result, we have 2 USB Type-C ports, 2 USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, a 3.5-mm jack and 3-in-1 card reader (SD/SDHC/SDXC).

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CPU

To evaluate the productivity of its processor, i7-8550U, we used a CPU-Z test, where we decided to clash it with the i7-7500U from Mi Notebook 13.3″. Below you can see the results.

Overall rating of the seventh-generation i7-7500U is 929.3 points with a single core rating of 278.1 points.

Overall rating of the seventh-generation i7-8550U is 1826.2 points with a single core rating of 364.8 points.

Mi Notebook 15.6″ is a productivity beast that easily takes on task after task. The core performance increased by 31.2%, while the overall performance of the processor jumped by 96.5%. Thus the newest Xiaomi laptop is almost twice as fast and strong as the previous iteration. Someday Xiaomi will release a notebook that will catch up to a desktop, take our word for it.

So, the device packs Intel Core i7-8550U eighth-generation processor, built on a 14-nm process, with 4 cores supporting 8 threads per core, and a clock speed of up to 4GHz. The write and read speeds are astonishingly quick: up to 4000Mbps and up to 1500Mbps correspondingly.

GPU

Mi Notebook 15.6″ sports a GeForce MX150 GPU, which we were most excited about. We were a little bit disappointed with the laptop’s performance in most advanced games of today, but it still earns a round of applause for how it gets along with only 2GB of video RAM.

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For a game performance test, we choose “Battlefield”. The game’s requirements for the system are very high. Unfortunately, the laptop did not have enough power to make the game fly at full resolution. The game automatically determined our configuration and dropped the resolution to minimal, turning a few settings off. The fps rate was tolerable, but we hoped it would have re fun.

In benchmarks, the laptop’s GPU scored 4358 points, while Mi Notebook 13.3″ scored 3213 points.

Sound

What will not disappoint is the quality of the speakers and sound. Thanks to Dolby Surround technology, the sound was not only really clear but also seemed voluminous and deep. We tried to play “Battlegrounds” without headphones on. From the speakers, even distant steps of the game characters could be heard. Great job in this department!

Heat dissipation

We can tell you this: overheating will not be the problem this laptop will someday die from. Below are the images of the laptop that we made with a help of using the thermal imager after an hour of playing the game. The temperature of the processor was 57.9 degrees Celsius, while the standard working temperature of the laptop is about 60-80 degrees. A slight slowdown of the laptop was observed only when exhibiting the highest parameters of the game, but, in general, the heat dissipated quickly.

Bottom line

In total, this is a solid laptop in terms of ergonomics, performance and battery life. With moderate usage, we could squeeze just a little over 9 hours of it. Gaming performance was not bad, but if we wanted a super-quality graphics we had to sacrifice the smoothness of the game flow. Well, this laptop is not meant to replace your PC gaming after all. For a work in the office, at home or on the road, despite being almost 2 kg, Mi Notebook 15.6″ is a terrific laptop.

Pros:

• i7-8550U processor;
• 8GB of RAM;
• FHD display;
• Dolby Surround technology;
• metal body;
• 60Wh battery.

Cons:

• no high-end gaming;
• weight.